[ale] grub rescue
Rich Faulkner
rfaulkner at Tux86.org
Wed Feb 22 09:15:31 EST 2012
When I returned to Linux I tried dual booting 9.10 w/X64 but GRUB2 soon
got the better of me. I've never really gotten the hang of it (but
haven't spent that much time with it either). Having several HDD in
that former system; I left X64 on one disk (and a borked GRUB2) and
installed Fedora 12 on a separate HDD w/GRUB (something I was more
comfortable with). Thus I got my Fedora installation running on a
separate (physical) disk and GRUB chain-loading X64 from the Windows
disk. Then I set the BIOS to boot the GRUB disk and thus I washed my
hands of it and rarely booted into XP. (My noob approach to a
workaround until such a time that I built a new machine).
New machine has now been in service for a long while and I'm running
ONLY 11.04 on it and am quite happy. I do run a Virtualbox VM of XP for
some work that I do for a museum in Colorado in CorelDraw 10; but that's
about how far I am willing to let Windows run on my machines anymore.
Unfortunately, our studio requires baremetal installs of Windows for
hardware support to our specialized broadcast audio cards. Digigram
doesn't have Linux drivers for their PCX924 cards thus we're stuck with
"Bill". We at least keep them offline and do all online work with
Ubuntu boxes.
Do we have any good GRUB2 pros in the group? Could be a good topic for
some of us at a monthly meeting. Just a thought.....
Rich in Lilburn
On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 22:48 -0500, Michael Campbell wrote:
> FWIW, after some scary episodes with dual booting and Windows' general
> anti-social behavior with it, I've moved to running a Windows host and
> my Ubuntu "machines" in a VM. A Linux host with a Windows as a VM
> also works, but for my use not as well.
>
>
>
> With sufficient hardware, they run pretty well together, and I get the
> best (or at least the necessary bits) from both worlds,
> simultaneously, and I can even run my VM off a USB drive and carry it
> around with me and have my complete environment wherever I go.
>
>
> I use VirtualBox as my VM container. No real problems so far to speak
> of. I'm a Java server side developer, so am running WebSphere tools
> and Oracle on the VM as my day to day routine.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Rich Faulkner <rfaulkner at tux86.org>
> wrote:
>
> ...and to think...Richard Stallman professed the use of "no
> password" as a password to keep systems open and free.
> Unfortunately the word "ethical" is lost on too many in the
> world thus we are pressed to encrypt our file systems.
>
> Glad you got your partition mounted and files copied!
>
> As for making the drive bootable again...reinstall GRUB?
>
> Rich
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 15:28 -0500, John Pilman wrote:
>
> > Here's an update on my progress with the scrambled partition table and
> > encrypted home directory.
> > Using dd I copied the hard drive and did the rest of this on the copy.
> > I ran testdisk from a live boot usb flash drive and was able
> > re-identify the unallocated partition as a linux partition and write
> > the partition table.
> > After a boot or two, gparted saw the partition as sda5.
> > Long story short for now, Ubuntu 11.04 includes the ultility
> > encryptfs-recover-private which was able to mount the encrypted
> > /home/john and I have now copied my files.
> > Caveat #1 - it took me a while to learn that my live boot usb Ubuntu
> > 11.04 had to be 64 bit since my original partition was 64 bit.
> > Caveat #2 - some of these steps were very time consuming.
> >
> > I next plan to try to see if I can make the hard drive bootable again.
> >
> > ...John
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 4:05 PM, John Pilman <jcpilman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Thanks for the ideas. I am starting with a second hard drive and the
> > > dd command as Derek said and I am going to try to recreate how I go
> > > into this mess. Understanding, at his point, is more valuable than
> > > the little bit of data since my last last backup.
> > >
> > > To partially answer some questions:
> > > The disk started with Windows 7 and I installed Ubuntu 10.10 with dual
> > > boot. So the partition utility is the one used during the Ubuntu
> > > install. Also, I vaguely remember a question about encryption during
> > > that process. I can't say for sure whether the partition or just the
> > > home directory was encrypted.
> > > Also, I'm not sure where the boot record was.
> > >
> > > If possible, I will reinstall everything and then find those answers.
> > > At, the speed this dd is going, I have some free time to do more research.
> > > ...John
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Jim Lynch
> > > <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:
> > >> On 02/18/2012 05:19 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > >>> Once you make your copy, try making all your unallocated space into a
> > >>> single linux partition. Then you can dd the first few MB off into a file
> > >>> (running a RAMDISK rescue environment, of course) and use 'file' to see if
> > >>> you got it right. Were you using LVM? Then from there you might be able
> > >>> to get lucky and find your partition endpoints.
> > >> Since you can now with grub2 boot from LVM that might be the answer.
> > >> I'm surprised that grub didn't recognize that. I'd find a live cd or
> > >> Knopix cd that understands LVM and see if the partition contains LVM
> > >> volumes before I did anything rash.
> > >>
> > >> Jim.
> > >> _______________________________________________
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120222/796f31b3/attachment-0001.html
More information about the Ale
mailing list